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Getting to 3.1

As we launch TeamConnect Enterprise 3.1, I wanted to reflect for a moment on how we got to this point.  TeamConnect Enterprise 2.0, which was released in 2001, was ahead of its time in terms of Web-based user interfaces. The user interface simulated a workstation desktop, allowing the users to keep open multiple records and switch effortlessly between them, much as they did with the windows taskbar. In addition, the view for each record consisted of a global menu, a toolbar as well as tabbed view to that record – similar to a typical windows application. That user interface worked well for several years, but more recently feedback from users, now spoiled by the simple light-weight Web UIs of Amazon, Yahoo, etc., indicated that the user interface was clunky and required too many page refreshes and mouse clicks to get work done.

The idea for TeamConnect Enterprise 3.0 originated in early 2006. The core requirement was to develop a simplified user interface that would be intuitive on its own and would not require a user to read a manual to navigate. Another requirement was to minimize mouse clicks and page refreshes, leading to a much enhanced user experience. This was now possible with Asynchronous Java and XML (AJAX), a programming technique that had become quite popular and was the ad-hoc standard for developing perceivably faster and more responsive Web applications.

The primary focus being a new and improved UI, we completely rewrote TeamConnect’s presentation layer, using open source technologies like spring and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to replace the proprietary UI framework of 2.x.  We used AJAX extensively to give us a "clean" and highly responsive UI, including minimizing the use of pop-ups. Now, a user could simply start typing in the value in a search field and the application would provide a drop down list of matching suggestions that could be selected without actually going to a search pop-up. Also, several operations, like adding project assignees, adding project relations and invoice line items, etc. no longer required a page refresh.

With the release of TeamConnect Enterprise 3.0, we also enabled end users to navigate the UI using the browsers navigation buttons. This allowed an end user to go back to a previously visited page using the browsers back button. This was a huge leap over 2.x, which, upon a user logging in, essentially launched another window with no browser controls visible – thus preventing the use of the back button. The undesirable side effect, of course, was that for every login there were two browser windows opened, one of which had to be manually closed. In 3.0, no additional browser windows are opened and a user can navigate between pages using the “back” and “forward” buttons of the browser, as if they were browsing around on the internet. Stay tuned for details on the clever bit of programming that made this possible.

While 3.0 was the “usability” release, a number of exciting new features and several very significant performance improvements around page rendering and caching in TeamConnect 3.1, make it the application to beat in its class and the reason I think clients should not hesitate to upgrade to it sooner rather than later. In subsequent blogs, I’ll visit features in the product that should make an immediate impact on user productivity.

Vished Kumar
Director of Software Development
Mitratech